Atrocious Revival

During May, for lack of funds, John Edgar Hoover furloughed half the 670 operatives of his Federal Bureau of Investigation and closed five regional offices. June was to have meant furloughs for the other half of the G-men,* but last week friends in Congress assured Chief Hoover that the final Deficiency Bill, to be reported out of committee this week, would provide funds to keep FBI at full strength. Two atrocities and a ruined weekend helped produce this good news.

The ruined weekend belonged to Mr. Hoover. His Memorial Day holiday in Manhattan was rudely interrupted when the headless, handless, footless corpse of Peter Levine, 12, kidnapped from New Rochelle last February, was washed ashore in Long Island Sound. This was the first recurrence since 1936 of the post-Prohibition atrocities which FBI thought it had stamped out by relentless sleuthing. Last week it was promptly followed by another in Princeton, Fla., a hot-dog hamlet just below Miami, on the highway to Key West. There chubby, blond James Bailey ("Skeegie") Cash Jr., 5 1/2, had been put to bed and left by his mother while she went to help her husband shut their grocery store for the night. Some one slit the rear screen door and carried off the child in his pajamas. Lodgers upstairs heard only a faint sound which they thought was the Cashes coming home. A ransom note was found at the house of Mr. Cash's brother.

Two evenings later, while James Bailey Cash Sr. drove out alone to a rendezvous, a stone crashed through a window at his home to call attention to another note. The thrower was heard escaping through the underbrush.

Near dawn next morning. Father Cash made the "contact" on a lonely road. He handed a shoe box containing $10,000 worth of marked $5, $10, $20 and $50 bills to a man with a flashlight. The man promised "Skeegie" would be returned promptly. As that day and the next passed, the Princeton crowds grew ugly. They began going out in posses to beat the tangled Florida bushland, to comb coastal bayous, jungled keys.

In a cold three-day rain, Chief Hoover's men at Miami set to work. He himself arrived by chartered plane and 14 more G-men flew in after him. Divers groped in old limestone quarries and pools; volunteer speedboats toured the keys; Seminoles and white trappers searched in the poisonous Everglades; planes scoured the wide, wild tip of the peninsula--all looking for a child they no longer expected to find alive.

*ln a signed newspaper piece last week, Chief Hoover wrote: "George ('Machine Gun') Kelly is supposed to have coined the name G-men while Special Agents of the FBI were pursuing him for the kidnaping of Charles F. Urschel of Oklahoma City. Kelly and his wife had fled from town to town until Kelly, who was a blowhard and a coward, got panicky.

"He turned on his cold, cruel wife, who had been the brains of the crime. 'You got me into this kidnaping racket,' he said. 'Now I've got G-heat on me and I'll never get rid of it.' "

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